Evaluating the pronunciation of proper names by four French grapheme-to-phoneme converters

International Speech Communication Association (Isca) - International Astronautical Federation.ISBN : 13 9781604234480.This article reports on the results of a cooperative evaluation of grapheme-to-phoneme (GP) conversion for proper names in French. This work was carried out within the framework of a general evaluation campaign of various speech and language processing devices, including text-to-speech synthesis. The corpus and the methodology are described. The results of 4 systems are analysed: with 12-20% word error rates on a list of 8,000 proper names, they give a fairly accurate picture of the progress achieved, the state-of-the-art and the problems still to be solved, in the domain of GP conversion in French. In addition, the resources and collected data will be made available to the scientific and industrial community, in order to be re-used in future bench-marks

Text-based Editing of Talking-head Video

Editing talking-head video to change the speech content or to remove filler words is challenging. We propose a novel method to edit talking-head video based on its transcript to produce a realistic output video in which the dialogue of the speaker has been modified, while maintaining a seamless audio-visual flow (i.e. no jump cuts). Our method automatically annotates an input talking-head video with phonemes, visemes, 3D face pose and geometry, reflectance, expression and scene illumination per frame. To edit a video, the user has to only edit the transcript, and an optimization strategy then chooses segments of the input corpus as base material. The annotated parameters corresponding to the selected segments are seamlessly stitched together and used to produce an intermediate video representation in which the lower half of the face is rendered with a parametric face model. Finally, a recurrent video generation network transforms this representation to a photorealistic video that matches the edited transcript. We demonstrate a large variety of edits, such as the addition, removal, and alteration of words, as well as convincing language translation and full sentence synthesis

"O lawful let it be / That I have room ... to curse a while" : voicing the nation's conscience in female complaint in Richard III, King John and Henry VIII

To understand what drives this female‐led quest for justice we must situate this as a response to the traumas of the recent past which still convulse the respective play‐worlds, whether the legacy of internecine strife from the War of the Roses that imprints itself upon the fractured court of Richard III, the unresolved struggle over the succession in King John, or the upheavals of the English Reformation in Henry VIII. Each of these plays evokes a profoundly dysfunctional society where the normal patrilineal structures of authority and legitimate succession have broken down, where oaths are routinely violated, theology is manipulated for political gain, and the law perverted to serve the will of individuals, instead of the bono publico. What is undeniably catastrophic for the body politic, though, proves oddly enabling for the plays' female protagonists

PROGRAM EVALUATION OF READING PLUS : STUDY OF THE IMPACT ON READING ACHIEVEMENT FOR NINTH-GRADE STUDENTS IN MOORE COUNTY SCHOOLS

The following is a program evaluation of the Reading Plus program in Moore County Schools from southern North Carolina and its impact on reading achievement for ninth-grade students. Reading Plus is a valuable asset that may be utilized to increase student ability to read. The Reading Plus program increases the degree of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading stamina, comprehension, character recognition and recall, vocabulary acquisition skills, and Lexile levels of students when the program is implemented with fidelity. The results of this study show that students who spent sufficient time on task, with each component of the program, demonstrated growth in all the areas mentioned above. Teachers who implemented this pilot were overwhelmingly pleased with the student outcomes and the program itself. The outcomes of this program evaluation were so impressive that the Reading Plus program is now being implemented at Riverside High School in Durham Public Schools, located in central North Carolina

The development and feasibility of a virtual patient for language training

"Thesis prepared and submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics)"Également disponible en version papier.Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 2 oct.. 2012)Applied Linguistics Concordia University 2009Bibliogr. : p. 119-12

Neurological aspects of foreign accent syndrome in stroke patients

Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is an intriguing motor speech disorder which has captured the interest of the scientific community and media for decades. At the moment, there is no comprehensive model which can account for the pathophysiology of this disorder. This paper presents a review of 112 FAS cases published between 1907 and October 2016: these were analyzed with respect to demographic characteristics, lesion location, associated neurocognitive symptoms, and comorbid speech and language disorders. The analysis revealed that organic-neurogenic FAS is more frequent in women than in men. In organic-neurogenic FAS over half of the patients acquired the foreign accent after a stroke. Their lesions are typically located in the left supratentorial regions of the brain, and generally involve the primary motor cortex and premotor cortex (BA 4 and 6), and/or the basal ganglia. Although neurocognitive data are not consistently reported, vascular FAS patients regularly suffer frontal executive dysfunctions. On the basis of a careful comparison of the cognitive and theoretical accounts of FAS, AoS and ataxic dysarthria, it is concluded that FAS should be regarded a dual component motor speech disorder in which both planning and motor execution of speech may be affected

The harmonious coexistence of sound and image for efficient audiovisual communication: the case of Kairos Communications LTD

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Ciências da Comunicação (área de especialização em Audiovisual e Multimédia)The present report is the result of a three-month traineeship at the Kairos Communications LTD in Maynooth, Ireland, which has long experience in cultural and religious sound and video productions, being an opportunity to practice audio-visual and multimedia knowledge acquired at the University of Minho. Although the traineeship was focused on production and post-production of contents, the Kairos Outside Broadcasting Unit was a big asset to improve technical skills. Based on the empirical experience acquired in the internship, this report is focused on the harmonious coexistence of sound and image for an efficient audio-visual communication. Sound and image corelates with each other as complementary elements in many digital media contents of today’s different digital platforms and applications. The increasing access to smartphones with great capabilities to record, edit ad share sound and image has turn most of the users into content producers, so that today, any cultural, politic, or social event has most probably someone catching sound or image. From the knowledge acquired with the research, an overview on the development of communication in the Democratic Republic of Congo is presented. Oral tradition has been the instrument to pass on knowledge to younger generations or convey information to the public. The development of communication in the Democratic Republic of Congo is linked to the former colonial power (Belgium) and France. France provided formation as well as equipment to update former radio journalists to the television that had been invading most of the world as an instrument of national pride. In fact, the development of media, mostly the radiobroadcast in the beginning, and then the television, was a great instrument of political propaganda for the newly independent African countries. Every country setup a radiobroadcast to free oneself from any other dependency. It was conceived as a great instrument to disseminate ideologies to the population. The forms of communication (verbal, non-verbal, written, etc.), the power and revolution of words and images in the world and in Africa, and the evolution in Congo, from oral to digital communication, are the focus of this report, which tries to understand what had led the Democratic Republic of Congo to the new media environment and where word and image intermingleO presente relatório é o resultado de um estágio de três meses na Kairos Communications LTD em Maynooth, Irlanda, que possui uma longa experiência em produções culturais e religiosas de som e vídeo, sendo uma oportunidade para praticar conhecimentos audiovisuais e multimédia adquiridos na Universidade do Minho. Embora o estágio tenha sido focado na produção e pós produção de conteúdos, a Kairos Outside Broadcasting Unit foi um grande ativo para o aperfeiçoamento das habilidades técnicas. Com base na experiência empírica adquirida no estágio, este relatório centra-se na coexistência harmoniosa de som e imagem para uma comunicação audiovisual eficiente. Som e imagem correlacionam-se entre si como elementos complementares em muitos conteúdos de média digital das diferentes plataformas e aplicativos digitais de hoje. O crescente acesso a smartphones com grandes recursos para gravar, editar e partilhar som e imagem transformou a maioria dos utilizadores em produtores de conteúdo, sendo que hoje, qualquer evento cultural, político ou social tem muito provavelmente alguém a captar o som ou a imagem. A partir dos conhecimentos adquiridos com a pesquisa realizada, é apresentado um panorama sobre o desenvolvimento da comunicação na República Democrática do Congo. A tradição oral tem sido o instrumento para passar conhecimento às gerações mais novas ou levar informações ao público. O desenvolvimento da comunicação na República Democrática do Congo está ligado à ex-potência colonial (Bélgica) e à França. A França forneceu formação e também equipamento para atualizar os ex-jornalistas de rádio sobre a televisão que vinha invadindo a maior parte do mundo como um instrumento de orgulho nacional. Na verdade, o desenvolvimento dos média principalmente a radiodifusão no início, e depois a televisão, foi um grande instrumento de propaganda política para os países africanos recém-independentes. Cada país estabelece uma transmissão de rádio para se libertar de qualquer outra dependência. Foi concebido como um grande instrumento de divulgação de ideologias para a população. As formas de comunicação (verbal, não verbal, escrita, etc.), o poder e a revolução das palavras e imagens no mundo e em África, e a evolução no Congo, da comunicação oral à digital, são o foco deste relatório, que procura compreender o que levou a República Democrática do Congo ao novo ambiente mediático no qual a palavra e a imagem misturam-se.Part of this work was supervised in the scope of the project “Audire - Audio Repository: saving sonic-based memories”, co-funded by the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization and by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (PTDC-COM-CSS/32159/2017). This has instructed the theoretical framework of the present work, specifically on the role of sound and its relationship with image, in the evolution of the communication models and the respective emancipation of communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo